Spotting Narcissists and Psychopaths in Workplace

Why do so many incompetent men/women become leaders? )_how to fix them…yes this indeed the title of the book (Tomas Chamorro) that took my attention and the gist of the fixing is how to spot narcissism and psychopathy in workplace from this book, some excerpts below:

Why Bad Guys Win?

“He is a dreadful manager,” said a worker. “I have found  it impossible to work for him . Very often, when told a  idea, he will immediately attack it and say it is worth-  less or even stupid, and tell you that it was a waste of tune  to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the  idea is a good one he will soon be telling people about it as  though it was his own.”  Few people would like the idea of working for such a  boss. And even fewer would expect a boss like that to be  held up as one of the best business leaders of all time. But  remarkably, the quote describes none other than Steve  Jobs, the founder of one of the most successful companies  in history. (The quote comes from Jef Raskin, who led  the design of the original Mac computer.) Apple has just  become the first trillion-dollar company in US history, even though it has not released a blockbuster product since Jobs’s death in 2011.

The Jobs paradox kept many puzzled, in part because it fits with a familiar archetype: exacting, visionary perfectionist who is turbocharged by unstoppable force of a gargantuan ego. unveilings, his stark uniform of black turtlenecks, and his megalomaniac mission, Jobs seemed to present a model for ambitious leaders to follow. It has even been said that he was capable of creating a cultish reality distortion when he talked about Apple products, convincing employees, investors, and suppliers that anything was possible. As we do with many tormented artists, we tend to see Jobs’s personality quirks as inseparable from his genius.

In reality, few leaders succeed when they are as difficult and badly behaved as Jobs was. A self-made billionaire with a flawed personality succeeds despite his or her character defects, not because of them. What makes the Jobs story a true exception is not only that he was hired back as Apple CEO—after being fired from his own company—but also that he achieved such extraordinary levels of success. As much as his fans would like to attribute Jobs’s unrivaled success to his eccentric and uncompromising personality, many narcissistic leaders have no problem distorting reality or coming up with colossal ideas or megalomaniac visions for the future. Their main problem is that they are not Steve Jobs, and without his talents, their delusions of grandeur will never become the next Apple. We have, alas, a tendency to generalize from unrepresentative examples, mostly because they are so memorable. Einstein’s lack of brilliance in his early years at school does not imply that bad grades will help you win a Nobel prize. Likewise, John Coltrane’s musical genius did not result from his heroin addiction—his talent somehow managed to survive the heroin. The only advantage of a difficult personality is that it may make a person unfit for traditional employment and can consequently propel them to launch their own business out of sheer necessity, if not revenge. But there is a big gap between being a mega-successful entrepreneur and being unemployable, and that gap is a function of talent rather than personality.

Many obnoxious leaders manage not only to remain employed but also to attain impressive levels of personal career success, despite their toxic personalities. To this end, this chapter explores the relationship between leadership and the two best-known examples of such toxic traits: narcissism and psychopathy. Looking at these two character traits will allow us to examine problematic leadership in more depth than we could by just talking about difficult bosses in general.

Spotting Narcissism

What do we mean when we say that someone is narcissistic? Primarily, narcissism involves an unrealistic sense of grandiosity and superiority, manifested in the form of vanity, self-admiration, and delusions of talent. Yet underlying this apparent superiority complex is often an unstable self- concept: because narcissists’ self-esteem is high but fragile, they often crave validation and recognition from others.

This craving is hardly surprising: if you are constantly showing off, you are probably desperate for others’ admiration. Such inner insecurity is rarely found in naturally humble people. Second, narcissists tend to be self-centered. They are less interested in others and have deficits in empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling. For this reason, narcissists are rarely found displaying any genuine consideration for people other than themselves. A third defining feature of narcissism concerns high levels of entitlement. Narcissists commonly behave as if they deserve certain privileges or enjoy higher status than their peers enjoy. Examples abound: “Do I really need to apply for a promotion?” “Why didn’t I get a bigger bonus?” “Do I have to wait in line?” Such entitlements may justify narcissists’ exploitative behaviors at work and elsewhere. When you think you are better than others, you perceive unfairness where there is none and behave in demeaning and condescending ways toward people.

For decades, psychologists have devised and tested different tools for detecting narcissism. The most common method is self-report questionnaires, which simply provide respondents with a list of statements relating to their personal habits, preferences, or dispositions. Examples of these statements are “I am a natural leader” and “I am more talented than most of the people I know.” And if you think that this method is too transparent to work, you are wrong. A recent study led by Sara Konrath of Indiana University showed that you can spot whether someone is a narcissist “To what extent do you agree with with a single question, this statement: ‘I am a narcissist.’ Note: The word ‘narcissist’ means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.

Participants then answered the question on a scale of 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me). To the researchers’ surprise, narcissistic individuals were quite happy to con- fess to being narcissistic, and the single question captured people’s narcissism with an accuracy comparable to longer, well-established tests, which the researchers demonstrated in eleven studies. Narcissism was easily detected by the single question because narcissists are not only aware of their extraordinary self-love, but also proud of it, for they truly love loving themselves, unashamedly.

Nonetheless, various less transparent methods are also available to detect narcissism. For example, executives’ narcissism can be inferred from the size and attractiveness of their corporate profile picture, the number of times they are mentioned in their organizations’ brochures and press releases, and the frequency with which they use the word I and other self-referential pronouns.5 For CEOs, their narcissism can also be inferred from their compensation: the bigger their egos, the bigger the gap between their salaries and those of everyone else in their organizations!6 More recently, several studies have shown that you can detect narcissism from a person’s digital footprint. For example, sexier, more attractive, self- promoting Facebook pictures and, of course, an excess of selfies, all suggest narcissism.

Spotting Psychopathy

Let us now turn our attention to the other major dark-side trait. Psychopathy is often discussed in connection with leadership, particularly when it comes to famous political and business leaders. Unlike narcissism, which is wide- spread, psychopathy is rare. And yet few toxic character traits have attracted as much public fascination and media attention as psychopathy has—even though only about 1 percent of the general population is thought to have psychopathic tendencies. Perhaps part of our obsession with psychopaths stems from the disproportionate rate at which they seem to succeed. Professor Robert Hare, a pioneer in the field of criminal psychology and coauthor of the influential book Snakes in Suits, famously noted that “not all psychopaths are in prison; some are in the boardroom.” According to estimates he reports in a subsequent study, there are three times as many psychopaths in management roles than in the overall population. More recently, a much higher figure of around 20 percent (one in five) has been reported for another US corporate sample. This large range in variability reflects how people measure psychopathy, but psychopathy levels do increase with levels of career success.

So, what makes someone psychopathic? The first salient feature is a lack of moral inhibition, which at an extreme is manifested in the form of strong antisocial tendencies and an intense desire to break the rules, even just for the sake of doing so. And when psychopaths do break the rules, they feel no guilt or remorse to avoid a repeat of events. people with psychopathic tendencies are also more prone to making reckless behavioral choices. For instance, psychopaths are more likely to drink, smoke, take drugs, and have promiscuous sexual relations and extramarital affairs. To be clear, not all adrenaline junkies are psychopathic, but the vast majority of psychopathic individuals are thrill seekers, and their reduced concern for danger will put them and others at risk. A third defining feature of psychopaths is their lack of empathy. They don’t care about what others are thinking or feeling, despite being able to understand those feelings.24 As a result, psychopaths are known for their cold dispositions. The absence of empathy is probably a major cause for their lack of moral constraints; it’s obviously much harder to behave in prosocial ways when you don’t care about people.

Unsurprisingly for a trait once described as “the mask of sanity,” psychopathy is not easily detected by laypeople.39 For this reason, you want to be alert to the potential risks of basing hiring decisions on short-term interactions with candidates. In fact, given their deceptive nature, fearless attitude, short-term likability, and skilled impression management, you can expect psychopaths to perform quite well during job interviews.40 Yet, just as you wouldn’t marry someone after only a first date, you should not select some- one for a leadership job solely because of the person’s inter- view performance—which is exactly that, a performance. Psychopaths are hard to detect, but you can simultaneously evaluate a leader’s psychopathy and predict its effects on his or her subordinates. How? You can simply ask the leader’s subordinates to rate their boss on critical indicators of psychopathy In one study, for example, employees were asked to rate their bosses on various personality aspects, such as “can make a joke out of anyone,” ‘enjoys being disruptive,” and “is not sincere.

Scientist have developed concise measures of psychopathy, such as the Short Dark Triad assessment.42 With just fifteen self-report statements, you can get a good sense of an individual’s psychopathy level. Here are some of those statements:

I am a thrill seeker.
I like to get revenge on authorities.
I never feel guilty
People who mess with me always regret it.

Of course, test takers can certainly fake their answers by portraying themselves in a less psychopathic way and by presenting a much more prosocial and conformist aspect of their personality. But such misrepresentation doesn’t happen enough to invalidate this test. Rather, people with psychopathic tendencies seem proud to answer honestly or at least are too defiant to hide their views, perhaps because they have little guilt about their personality or care little about what others make of them. their psychopathic inclinations. For example, a study found that the number of selfies people post on social media reliably indicates their psychopathy level. Psychopathy can also be detected in language, as psychopathic individuals speak and write in a more dominant and coercive way and express more aggression and irritability. For instance, the tendency to swear is a consistent indicator of higher psychopathy. Another linguistic feature associated with psychopathy is the proclivity to talk about power, money, sex, and physical needs, whereas lower-psychopathy individuals tend to talk more about family, friends, and spirituality. In short, we have numerous intuitive signals to detect people with psychopathic tendencies.

Tesla’s Inventor Instincts in School Days

Had an opportunity to delve into Nikola Tesla’s “My Inventions” a book co-written by him around 1900. He’s a prolific inventor of many electrical devices and apparatuses – equal in ambition, inventiveness and precocity to that of Edison.  Perhaps this from his own book provides an insight of what his formula and how he used his visions in due course to come with great many inventions, notably alternating current (AC) generator and transmission – quintessential to our days’ ubiquitous power generation and transmission needs topping that with wireless power transfer as well. Excerpts from his book:

His visions and how he took care of his health:
I all dwell briefly on these extraordinary experiences, on account of their possible interest to students of psychology and physiology and also because this period of agony was of the greatest consequence on my mental development and subsequent labors. But it is indispensable to first relate the circumstances and conditions which preceded them and in which might be found their partial explanation.

From childhood I was compelled to concentrate attention upon myself. This caused me much suffering but, to my present view, it was a blessing in disguise for it has taught me to appreciate the inestimable value of introspection in the preservation of life, as well as a means of achievement.

The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness through all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways. Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves.

The premature death of millions is primarily traceable to this cause. Even among those who exercise care it is mistake to avoid imaginary, and ignore the a common real dangers. And what is true of an also applies, more or less, to a people as a whole.
Witness, in illustration, the prohibition movement.A drastic, if not unconstitutional, measure is now being put through in this country to prevent the consumption of alcohol and yet it is a positive fact that coffee, tea,tobacco, chewing gum and other stimulants, which are freely indulged in even at the tender age, are vastly more injurious to the national body, judging from the number of those who succumb. So, for instance, during my student years I gathered from the published necro-logues in Vienna, the home of coffee drinkers, that deaths from heart trouble sometimes reached 67% of the total. Similar observations might probably be made in cities where the consumption of tea is excessive. These delicious beverages super-excite and gradually exhaust the fine fibers of the brain. They also interfere seriously with arterial circulation and should be enjoyed all the more sparingly as their deleterious effects are slow and imperceptible. Tobacco, on the other hand, is conducive to easy and pleasant thinking and detracts from the intensity and concentration necessary to all original and vigorous effort of the intellect. Chewing gum is helpful for a short while but soon drains the glandular system and inflicts irreparable damage, not to speak of the revulsion it creates. Alcohol in small quantities is an excellent tonic, but is toxic in its action when absorbed in larger amounts, quite immaterial as to whether it is taken in as whiskey or produced in the stomach from sugar. But it should not be overlooked that all these are great eliminators assisting Nature, as they do, in upholding her stern but just law of the survival of the fittest. Eager reformers should also be mindful of the eternal perversity of mankind which makes the indifferent “laissez-faire” by far preferable to enforced restraint.

The truth about this is that we need stimulants to do our best work under present living conditions, and that we must exercise moderation and control our appetites and inclinations in every direction. That is what I have been doing for many years, in this way maintaining myself young in body and mind. Abstinence was not always to my liking but I find ample reward in the agreeable experiences I am now making. Just in the hope of converting some to my precepts and convictions I will recall one or two.

Just the One Here:
I fell into a worse predicament once. There was a large flour mill with a dam across the river near the city where I was studying at that time. As a rule the height of the water was only two or three inches above the dam and to swim out to it was a sport not very dangerous in which I often indulged. One day I went alone to the river to enjoy myself as usual. When I was a short distance from the masonry, however, I was horrified to observe that the water had risen and was carrying me along swiftly. I tried to get away but it was too late. Luckily, though, I saved myself from being swept over by taking hold of the wall with both hands. The pressure against my chest was great and I was barely able to keep my head above the surface. Not a soul was in sight and my voice was lost in the roar of the fall. Slowly and gradually I became exhausted and unable to withstand the strain longer. Just as I was about to let go, to be dashed against the rocks below, I saw in a flash of light a familiar diagram illustrating the hydraulic principle that the pressure of a fluid in motion is proportionate to the area exposed, and automatically I turned on my left side. As if by magic the pressure was reduced and I found it comparatively easy in that position to resist the force of the stream. But the danger still confronted me. I knew that sooner or later I would be carried down, as it was not possible for any help to reach me in time, even if I attracted attention. I am ambidextrous now  but then I was left-handed and had comparatively little  strength in my right arm. For this reason I did not dare  to turn on the other side to rest and nothing remained  but to slowly push my body along the dam. I had to  get away from the mill towards which my face was  turned as the current there was much swifter and deeper.  It was a long and painful ordeal and I came near to  failing at its very end for I was confronted with a depression in the masonry. I managed to get over with the last  ounce of my force and fell in a swoon when I reached  the bank, where I was found. I had torn virtually all the  skin from my left side and it took several weeks before  the fever subsided and I was well. These are only two  of many instances but they may be sufficient to show  that had it not been for the inventor’s instinct I would  not have lived to tell this tale.

The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill

Some wit from those compiled, edited and introduced by Dominique Enright.

Just before the wit some wisdom – notable works of WSC to refer and get a bit of wisdom:

1. The World Crisis
2. Marlborough
3. The Second World War
4. The Histories of English Speaking Peoples
5. Besides numerous volumes of speeches, broadcasts, volumes of autobiography, a biography of his father and one rather poor novel Savrola

Be Killed by Many Times

1. The world today is rules by harassed politicians absorbed in getting into office or turning out the other man so that not much room is left for debating great issues on their merits
2. On the qualities required by a politician: ‘The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.’
3. ‘No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’
4. Of WSC’s (then) fellow Conservatives: ‘They are a class of right honorable gentlemen — all good men, all honest men — who are ready to make great sacrifices for their opinions, but they have no opinions. They are ready to die for the truth, if only they knew what the truth was.’
5. ‘Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others change their principles for the sake of their party.’
6. ‘To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.’

Terminological Diversions: Words

1. ‘Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.’
2. ‘We must have a better word than “prefabricated”. Why not “ready-made”?’
3. ‘Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all’

Pigs treats US Equals

1. On being advised his fly buttons were undone: ‘Dead birds don’t fall out of their nests.’
2. ‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping that it will eat him last.’

Casting pearls: Speeches

1. ‘I’m going to make a long speech because I’ve not had the time to prepare a short one.
2. ‘ On verbosity: ‘It is sheer laziness not compressing thought into a reasonable space.’
3. On MP Lord Charles Beresford: ‘He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, “Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, they do not know what they have said.” ‘ ‘I can well understand the Honorable Member’s wishing to speak on. He needs the practice badly.’
4. ‘Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase even if it is conversational.’

Friends Like These

1. On Stanley Baldwin: ‘The Government cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on, in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.’
2. ‘It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.’
3. On Field Marshal Sir Bernard ( 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, one of Britain’s most successful Military leaders): ‘In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.’
4. On Clement Attlee: ‘A sheep in sheep’s clothing.’ ‘If any grub is fed on Royal Jelly it turns into a Queen Bee.’ ‘He is a modest man who has a good deal to be modest about.’ ‘An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door was opened Attlee got out.’
5. On Herbert Morrison (Labor statesman, and deputy PM in Attlee’s administration, 1945—51): ‘A curious mixture of geniality and venom.’
6. On Stafford Cripps (Labor statesman, Chancellor the 1947-50): •He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.’
7. On George Bernard Shaw: ‘Few people practice what they preach and none less so than George Bernard Shaw Saint, sage and clown; venerable, profound and irresistible.’

Of Course I’m an Egoist

1. ‘Eating my words has never given indigestion.’
2. On his friend Leo Amery. • I shall suck to you with all the loyalty o fa leech.’
3. ‘l always manage somehow to adjust to any new level of luxury Without whimper or complaint. It is one of my more winning traits.’
4. On his seventy-fifth birthday: ‘I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is ready for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.’
5. On attending a dinner for the Prince of Wales, later Edward 1711, in 1896: ‘I realized that I must be on my best behavior punctual, subdued, reserved — in short, display all the qualities with which I am the least endowed.’

What kind of People

1. ‘The English never draw a line without blurring it.’

An ineradicable habit: Drink

1. ‘A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced, the imagination is agreeably stirred, the wits become more nimble. A bottle produces the contrary effect.’
2. ‘Good cognac is like a woman. Do not assault it. Coddle and warn) it in your hands before you sip it.’

‘Our maxims will remain’: Epigrams

1. Among his most famous words is the epigraph: In war: resolution In defeat: defiance In victory: magnanimity In peace: goodwill.
2. ‘A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.’
3. ‘It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.’
4. ‘Youth is for freedom and reform, maturity for judicious compromise, and old age for stability and repose.’
5. ‘Diplomacy is the art of telling plain truths without giving offence.’
6. ‘Never stand so high upon a principle that you cannot lower it to suit the circumstances.’
7. ‘It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look farther than you can see.’
8. You will never get to the end of journey if you stop to shy a stone at every dog that barks.’
9. ‘Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness.’
10. ‘The worst quarrels only arise when both sides are equally in the right and in the wrong.’

Monty Python Tidbits

I happened to read John Cleese – Professor at Large, his discussions while at Cornell University in various capacities goading, inspiring and informing students in arts, writing and acting. A creative person by himself writing, acting, directing Monty Python and other sequels have a wealth of info and insights to share on various topics. I’ve collected some for this book for your notice:

Meetings – How to tackle subjects like coaching and assertiveness and how to deliver bad news?

If you have bad news to give someone in an interview or in a situation like that, give it right up front. Don’t beat about the bush for twenty-five minutes, because they sense that something’s up and become more and more anxious. Tell them the bad news. You know, if you’ve got to fire someone, then say it and then give them a chance to be a bit emotional, which is actually reasonable, and then as they come out of the emotion, you can start discussing how you’ll handle it and what to do about it. In England, we had terrible industrial relations for years. In the past, the directors of the company—the fat cats—would stick a notice on the board at three o’clock on Friday afternoon, get in their cars, and drive off to the golf course. You see what I mean? Refusing any kind of ordinary human interaction. If you behave properly with people and just treat them as proper human beings, they can take bad news.

You know what’s the worst thing you can do to kids? It’s to lie to them. Robin Skynner, with whom I wrote those books, said that kids are unbelievably resilient, providing they’re not lied to. And I didn’t feel that was the case in the last eight years. I mean, who’s going to be open with Cheney? What’s the point? And these people know it. Rumsfeld used to start his big meetings at the Pentagon by saying, “Who’s buying?” Meaning, who is going to pay for this? Who wants this meeting? That’s a great start, isn’t it? Who wants this meeting? This is somebody who really won’t listen to a new idea because they’ve got completely stuck. Unlike the guided missile, they’re not listening to any feedback.

Now Obama gets into office and he puts in people with different ideas and wants to have a good argument. That’s how you make things exciting and vibrant, not with a bunch of know-it-alls at the who are treating all the people under them as second-class citizens who have got to do what they arc told. Somebody once said, “Why not use the intelligence of the entire organization instead of using the intelligence of the CEO and having everyone else just carry out his ideas.

Astrology – Is there a Scientific Evidence?

I’m beginning more and more to think that there’s something—I don’t know what it is—what Carl Jung called “synchronicity.” And I’m just convinced, the older I get, that this is kind of significant. I think that it is very strange that there I was on the exercise bicycle today and on comes Keith Olbermann, who is a sort of friend of mine but I haven’t seen him in a while, and there he is with Bill Maher and they are talking about Cornell, and here I am sitting in Cornell. I don’t know what it means, but there’s something about it. I really believe that.

And I think that the more I read about quantum physics, the more I am quite convinced that this is a very much weirder universe than anyone knows. People get very upset with this kind of thing. If you want one example of what I am talking about, Google the following word: Gauquelin. This guy did statistical research that shows almost, I think incontrovertibly, that there is something—whatever t is, I don’t know—to astrology. He shows that, for example, generals and athletes have Mars coming over the horizon at the time of their birth more than they statistically should, and artists and musicians have a lack of Mars influence in their charts. Now, you may think it’s poppycock, but look at the statistics. It’s very strange and yet no one is talking about this.

Precognition – Do we know beforehand?

There’s a guy, Dean Radin, who works in the Institute of Noetic Sciences, just north of San Francisco. He’s done this experiment which has been reproduced in psychological departments at the best universities all over Europe. They put people in front of a television set and they then show them pictures. There are three types of pictures: there are neutral pictures, like a picture of a telephone or a parachute; there are sort of nice erotic, not very strongly erotic but slightly erotic, pictures; and then there are horrible pictures, which are pictures of accidents and operations, very bloody and nasty. And what they’ve shown is that if they put those pads that measure the galvanic skin response of people—you know, a measure of anxiety—what they have discovered is that before the nasty pictures, but not before the neutral pictures or the erotic ones, but before the nasty ones, which are being generated at random, there’s a rise in the anxiety levels when people are about to see the nasty pictures. Now, how could they possibly know? They’re not reacting in that way before they see a neutral image or when they see an erotic one. Two seconds beforehand, they know that they are going to see a nasty one. And the images are randomly generated. I think this is fascinating. But nobody takes it into account because it is contrary to the current paradigm.

Yesterday’s movies and Today’s Comics vs. Classic Comedies

When I say to people now, “What was the last really classy comedy you saw?” there’s usually a complete silence while they try to think of one because Judd Apatow has cornered a particular kind which, I think, is summed up in Hangover. The problem with Hangover is it’s funny, but it’s about drugs, gambling, sex, alcohol, celebrity—that’s a very limited palette with which to paint the comic picture. Do you see what I mean? I always wanted to do a film about 1776 because there’s so much about it that’s funny, which all gets covered up by the myths, you know. Basically, a third of the Americans were pro-British, a third of them were anti-British, and a third really didn’t give a damn. That, itself, is quite funny. Another thing that always made me laugh was that most of the British troops were actually German. They were from Brunswick and Hesse and Hannover, and I thought if you started the movie with the British troops saying, “Ja, das ist der Führer (German-sounding gibberish).” Then you cut to the American trenches and they say, “Goddamn British.”

Neurosis and Its Effects

My Mother was a very neurotic woman, very neurotic. She is the only person I’ve ever met in my life who used to write her worries down so that she wouldn’t forget any of them. She had this vast spectrum of anxiety, you see. And she thought that if she spent enough time worrying about them all, she’d somehow manage to keep them at bay by the actual act of worrying. She kept the bad things at bay, and she seemed to believe if she forgot to worry about one of them, it would come and get her. I tell you, if you have a mother like that, it takes some time to get better. Which is why I’ve spent about a quarter of my life in psychiatrist chairs and another quarter in dentist chairs—because I’m a war baby. I have the worst teeth in the world. Well, she did have a pretty mean temper, I always say there was only one thing that my mother wanted, just one thing—that was her own way. And if she didn’t get it, there was trouble. There were tantrums and a great deal of noise, and Dad, who’d fought in the First World War for three and a half years, I think, sometimes yearned for the relative tranquility Of the trenches.

What is the secret to a happy life?

Well, quite seriously, I think it’s about having modest aims. The most important thing in life, apart from finding the right person to be with, is to find something, a job that you find interesting. What helps most here is to realize how much money you really need.

There’s a wonderful statistic, which is something like 33 percent of the American population believe that they are going to be billionaires within the next five years. Many of them are going to be disappointed, aren’t they? So don’t glamorize money. A close friend of mine was talking to a doorman at an extraordinarily expensive apartment block in New York where many of the residents are billionaires. And the doorman, who sees them going in and out every day, commented that they never seem to be happy. In America, in particular, there’s a sort of feeling that if you’re not rich and famous, you’re sort of a failure. You’ve missed the boat. And this is the most pernicious attitude because, for centuries, we had people who were quite content to be part of a community and to do a job well and to have good friends in the community and to bring up children. That was considered a good life, but now it’s not good enough. Well, that means that 99.9 percent of the population is going to be disappointed. So the first thing is keep your aims achievable.

The second thing is don’t have children. You’re laughing, but children cause most of the misery in the world. If you have children, you worry yourself sick about them, they cost a fortune, and then they grow up like their mothers. So avoid children. Instead, have cats. Yes, because cats are fantastic. They’re absolutely wonderful; they’re affectionate when they feel like it, and they’re just a pleasure to have around. My wife and I have four cats—three of them are American, Maine coons. One of them is bigger than she is. It’s the biggest cat I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s having a saddle made so that she can ride it. And the nice thing about cats is when they grow up, they don’t blame you for everything.

What are your top tips for seduction?

I’ll be honest—for years I was embarrassed and uptight and totally English with women. And I think it was because of my relationship with my mother and going to a single-sex school. When I went to Cambridge, there were two hundred people studying law with me and three of them were women, so I just didn’t know how to relate to them, and I think I thought, having been to the James Bond films, that there must be a sort of button that, if I pressed it in myself, I’d suddenly become masterful or effortlessly macho or something. Finally, I learned that if you can be yourself and not show off too much, then it’s very easy to see whether a woman likes you or not. That’s better than spending a long time pretending to be someone else. Because eventually they find out who you really are anyway, and you’ve wasted a lot of time. The other thing, of course, is to pretend to be actually be interested in them! When I went to Australia for the first time, I started to become successful with girls because they couldn’t get over the fact that I actually listened to what they said. You see, this was not part of the Australian culture, so it seemed to be a very powerful aphrodisiac. A bit like Northern Ireland, you know, when they used to go to dances and the men would be at one end of the hall and the women would be at the other, and occasionally they would dance against each other.

Others

Sugar is the number one reason for heart disease than fat
Don;t confuse activity with achievement

Rand Fishkin on Management

IF MANAGEMENT IS THE ONLY WAY UP, WE’RE ALL F’D – Managing Is a Skill, Not a Prize

You’ve almost certainly heard of The Peter Principle, a 1969 book by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull, which popularized the quote at this chapter’s start. The theory behind it is that each employee is judged for their next promotion based on their performance at the current one, rather than their potential aptitude for the new work required in that higher-up role. Hence, people advance at an organization until they are no longer competent in their positions, and the company is left with more and more incompetence at senior levels. It’s inevitable that this ugly scenario will occur if employees stop being promoted only after they can no longer perform effectively. Knowing this theory is one thing. Finding a way to combat it, another.

Here’s the challenge in a nutshell: Say you want to grow your product design team. For the past two and a half years, you’ve had an effective product designer who’s built great stuff and earned the trust and respect of the people around them. But the designer’s proven value comes from the work they do—understanding customers, crafting user experiences that serve those audiences, and managing communication with the engineers who build the product, the marketers who promote it, and the end customers who use it. This designer is clearly effective but doesn’t have management experience and hasn’t displayed the skills or passion for the demands of management. The designer comes to you and asks to manage this new team of designers. You were planning to hire only one new designer, and it’s awkward to have a manager with only a single report, but you figure maybe the team will get bigger if the company maintains its growth. You also want to reward the great work this designer has done and the loyalty they’ve displayed sticking with the company. On the flip side, you hate to lose the designer’s high-quality work as an individual contributor, and in the last few years they’ve shown increasing effective. ness and quality as they’ve gelled with the people around and built strong product intuition.

You’re between a rock and a hard place. Do you tell your designer to stick with what they’re good at and risk losing them to a company that will promote them to the management role they believe they’ve earned and deserve? Or do you promote the designer to manager, and then hire or contract extra help to make up for the work they used to do, hope that they’ll eventually learn and excel at those managerial skills, and sacrifice the direct application of their learned expertise? Underlying this problem is a belief that anyone can be a people manager, and that unlike any other specialized role (e.g., accounting, marketing, engineering, design, or sales), all it takes is the will to manage and an understanding of the problem space. This is bullshit. One of the hardest, most frustrating conversations I consistently have with team members is the one about what managers do versus what individual contributors (ICs) do. Many ICs believe that management is just telling people what to do and making sure they do it. Tiey assume (falsely, in my experience) that only managers who’ve previously done the work themselves can be effective. They make an inherent assumption, often based on real, personal experiences (which are impossibly hard to argue against), that the best managers are the people who used to be the best ICs, thus proving their worthiness as leaders. A mediocre engineer will make for a poor engineering manager. A great customer service manager could never be an effective engineering manager. These myths are so easy to believe and so tied up in standard business protocols that unraveling them is like pulling teeth every time.

Thankfully, I’ve got the evidence, after a decade of growing teams and shrinking them, of observing great people doing awful work and seeing previously poor performers excel to say that the line between being great at the work yourself and being a great manager of the people doing that work is largely disconnected. I will absolutely concede that much of the time, great people managers were good at, or at least performed, the jobs of their reports at one time or another. But that, my friends, is correlation, not causation. Just because most managers apply for and are promoted into their role by virtue of their IC work in that same arena does not mean that IC work is necessarily connected to effective management.

Moz’s own history may be too small a sample size, but thankfully, 1 have help. Google, one of the most admired companies in the tech world, has spent years analyzing the most and least effective teams at their company and trying to identify what consistently separates high performers from low. In their research on what makes for managers through the re:Work program, Google started from a novel premise: assume managers don’t make teams better. lhey attempted to prove this hypothesis by identifying high- versus low-performing teams and looking for any correlation with the managing individual. Was it the case that “great” or “terrible” managers could be identified—folks who moved from team to team and consistently brought up (or down) the performance of their groups? Indeed it was. Unsurprisingly, Google found that managers did make a difference after all, and that teams with great managers were happier and more productive. What might be surprising, though, is what Google found to be the eight behaviors consistent across strong people managers. Here they are, in order:

1. Is a good coach
2. Empowers team and does not micromanage
3. Expresses interest/concern for team members’ success and well being
4. Is productive and results oriented
5. Is a good communicator
6. Helps with career development
7. Has a clear vision/strategy for the team
8. Has important technical skills that help him/her advise the team

Number eight. Dead last on the list. That’s where the quality of technical work the managers themselves are capable of comes into play. It’s not that it doesn’t matter at all, but of managerial qualities, it sits behind every other crucial skill.

On the great teams I’ve observed in which the manager did not possess technical skills, there was often a surprising benefit: the team members themselves upgraded one another’s skills, mentored one another, and more often, took greater responsibility for the output ofthe work. I suspect that’s because in teams with managers who possess their own strong technical skills, the work gets done their way, and the improvement in skills tends to be clustered around the managers’ specific strengths. It also strikes me that because of the reliance on these highly skilled managers, there’s less individual effort given by the team’s members to explore and expand on their own. This isn’t always the case—sometimes a great IC will make for a great people manager who encourages broader education from the team and who encourages dissent on how to do things rather than enforcing his own tried-and-true methods. But both my own lived experiences and the research suggest that people management and IC work are two fundamentally different things whose overlap is neither obvious nor consistent.

Creating a culture that matters–Part III

Conflict Resolution using GROW – A CONSTRUCTIVE UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATION – A use case verbatim from his book:

You can’t avoid conflict. That’s a fact of business. If you put two people together, they will, at some point, have a problem with each other. That hap- pens even in the best of environments and the happiest of marriages. It’s inevitable. But how do you handle the conflict? That tells the tale.

If your employee promises to have a task completed by Wednesday and you still don’t have it by Friday, what do you do? Storm into their workspace, demanding they get it done? Berate them for being incompetent? Assume they’re lazy and start talking behind their back?

Two problems with that approach. For one, it doesn’t solve the problem. Two—and this is the kicker—it spawns a whole new host of troubles. When you shift the focus from the problem to the person, you attack them personally. Think back. Can you still hear former teachers, relatives, or classmates taunting you with jabs or insults? You may not even remember why they said the hurtful thing they did, but you can still remember the pain. When you do that in a business setting, you’re doing the same thing. Now, not only is the problem not solved, but you’ve hurt your employee. Depending on their personality, they may hold a grudge, sabotage future work, go home and break down, ratchet down their effort, or resent you. Attacking the person never produces a positive result.

Both inside the Principal’s Office and elsewhere, we used a model of conflict resolution called G.R.O.W.:

• Goals
• Reality
• Options
• What by when?

Sometimes uncomfortable conversations are one-on-one conversations and sometimes they need to happen with multiple people. Here’s how an actual G.R.O.W. meeting transpired at DT with Kevin, Christian, Glenn, Pete, and Darrin. This was an unusually large group so we had to pull in a few extra chairs, but after every- one filed into the Principal’s Office, I began: “Hey guys, we need to have an uncomfortable conversation.”

I could tell by the looks on their faces that only about half of the group knew what this was about. I explained the situation, “A customer called this morning. She was upset after watching one of our new Photoshop courses that just came out. She said she could barely understand what was being said and after watching it, I agree—we must do better. Everyone in this room had a hand in creating that course from start to finish.” No one said anything, so I continued. “Let’s figure out how to resolve this and make sure it doesn’t happen again in the future.” I got up and went to the white board and wrote the letters G.R.O.W. down the left side of the board. Next to the G, I wrote the goal: “We produce high-quality video content with clear audio and video.”

Then I wrote the reality I had just explained next to R: “The new Photoshop course was released and had multiple videos with audio that was barely audible.” I turned around, “What are our options?” After a moment, Darrin broke the silence. “I’m sorry guys,” she said. “I should’ve caught that.”

“We’re all responsible,” Christian said. “I remember that Course. We had a lot of errors and it took a long time to get it from the author. I thought it wasn’t great, but I knew it’d take even longer to get him to re-record stuff, so I let it go through anyway.” “What’s done is done,” I moved the conversation along, “Talk to me about what options we can do to move forward.”

I could see the gears start turning as everyone focused on solving the problem. Within a few moments, this went from an uncomfortable conversation about dropping the ball on one course to a chance to solve a problem and improve the quality of all our courses. Everyone was throwing out ideas. I wrote down the options as the team thought of them. After fifteen minutes, the ideas started to slow down. We had five options on the board:

• Have the author re-record the problem videos in this course
• Add more quality control steps
• Improve our pipeline to be able to identify these issues
• Make it more transparent to everyone involved when a course is getting off track or could be prone to errors
• Communicate better between teams

“Great,” I said, looking at the list of options. ‘ ‘Now what will we do, and by when?” Everyone started throwing out action items. Kevin would call the author and ask him to re-record as soon as he got out of the meeting. Glenn would work with the dev team next sprint to build a long-term solution for our internal tools to clearly identify a course as being error-prone. In the interim, Christian would notify Pete in quality assurance about which videos needed a lot of edits so Pete would know to check those videos more closely. Finally, by the end of the week, Darrin would build a process for everyone working on our backend software so each course had someone accountable for it and communication could be clearer across the teams.

The whole meeting took about half an hour, and not only was the course updated within a week, but we had new processes in place to keep similar issues from happening in the future.

Now imagine if I’d barged in there with guns blazing: “You don’t know how to do your shit! Why can’t you just do what you’re supposed to!?” Immediately, everyone would be on the defensive, we wouldn’t get nearly as much resolved, and the meeting itself probably would’ve taken twice as long. This is important: as the boss, I didn’t give the team an ultima- turn. I laid out the parameters—the business reality—and then let them come up with a solution that worked within that. That way, my team owned the solution and committed themselves to living up to the expectation they had set.

Here’s the other important piece: by focusing on the reality and the solution, we took the emotional element out of the equation. The conflict didn’t turn into a trial of their sins and personal shortcomings. We looked at where we were, we wanted to be, and then charted a course to get from Point A to Point B.

Once I began following this system, team leaders began it with their teams. Eventually even co-workers used It to problems between each other. The transformation fascinated conversations that could have easily resulted in people holding grudges for days —if not years—went off without a hitch. People walked into the Principal’s Office and walked out laughing. It was just another one of those things that made our tribe magical.

Creating a culture that matters–Part II

Hiring

Inside of a week, that new hire was exposed to dozens of people recounting the great times they’ve had and their motivation for getting out of bed in the morning. Not only did they get to meet each person, but they were quickly indoctrinated into “the way we do things around here.”

I mentioned earlier that one of the greatest ways to build a sense of belonging is through shared experiences. The new hire game provided the opportunity for the Digital-Tutors tribe to share some of their favorite memories. This was about much more than just sharing something that happened, but without fail it showed the spark of belonging that you, a member of the Digital-Tutors tribe, felt as you relived your favorite memory. There were a number of these stories that became legends in the Digital-Tutors tribe—stories that were passed on from person to person. When a new hire sees that spark, they want to be a part of that experience. They see the meaning this provides, and it’s something they want.

The way I saw it, the quicker I could help you make friends with your co-workers, the quicker you’d want to do great work. Our envy-inspiring productivity came from the exponential leverage of our team members working together. The more you became a part of our team, the more exponential value you contributed to the tribe.

Looking back, I also see how this dug the moat even deeper. Where else could you feel that kind of welcome? What other company was going to pour that much care and passion into the lowest guy on the totem pole? After coming on board with Digital-Tutors, I wanted every other job our employees ever had to pale in comparison.

A first impression can be made only once. As important as they are, most people give a new company some time as they start to learn the ropes. Once you’ve hired someone, the flrst thirty days are pivotal to ensuring their success in the tribe. It’s make-or- break time.

1. What are you doing to welcome new hires into your tribe?
2. How are you helping new hires navigate their first month?
3. What are the legends in your tribe, and how can you communicate them to new hires?

Firing

Even though everyone saw the inevitable coming, that doesn’t change the fact that this was a person they had gotten to know. They had laughed with us during Thai Thursdays. They weren’t strangers. It was painful each and every time. Sometimes the only way to deal with the pain of loss is to let people speak from the heart. So I offered that opportunity. The same day I let someone I’d call a meeting with the rest of the company and leave the floor open for anyone else to speak their mind or ask any questions. If anger and frustration are nothing more than unfulfilled expectations, as a business owner, you need to make sure there aren’t any unfulfilled expectations. At Digital-Tutors, everyone had the expectation that we were all playing by the rules, a.k.a. our values. When someone wasn’t playing by those rules, everyone needed to understand how they were broken.

After sharing the news with the staff, my office door was always open for anyone who may not have wanted to ask their questions in front of the rest of the company. I always encouraged my leadership team to initiate smaller discussions within their teams as well. This opportunity to clear the air also helped manage any mismatched expectations.

Firing someone affects everyone. Stay true to your values. You can mitigate anger and frustration by setting clear expectations up front. Before letting someone go, sit down with them and outline the reasons why they’re not fitting into the tribe. If you’ve outlined the rules of your game, it should be very clear to one—including the person you’re thinking of letting go—that those values are the standard they need to achieve to work with your tribe. During many of my coaching sessions, I have leaders who ask what they should do about one of their employees. I never recommend fifing as the first recourse. As a leader, it’s up to you to exhaust all other options for that member of your tribe. Maybe they don’t see where they’re failing to align with the tribe’s values. To borrow from Jim Collins again, maybe they need a different seat on the bus.

Hopefully, you’ve started working on a great onboarding process. Now, you need to start working on a solid process for working with challenging employees. Think about one such person on your team. (Nearly everyone has one.) We’ll call him “Sam.”

• Why did I originally hire Sam? What has changed?
• Which of my core values are being violated? Why do I feel like fifing Sam now?
• How much of this is the fault of my own failure in leadership and management?
• Does Sam exhibit a willingness to change and improve?
• Have I clearly communicated to Sam that he isn’t meeting expectations? Does Sam realize there’s a problem? If so, does he realize how serious it is? What training can I offer Sam to help him be successful in his current role?
• What other roles am I trying to fill in my company? Could Sam grow into one of them?
• Are there any new roles Sam could tackle?
• Have I done everything I possibly could to help Sam succeed here?
• If I’ve exhausted every other possibility, why haven’t I already fired Sam? Why am I allowing him to lower the bar for what’s acceptable in my company?

Your People are Your Company

An episode from Piyush Patel’s ‘Lead your Tribe Love your Work’ on people and culture – how to create one and why it’s significant and can’t be replicated/ What made him to realize this and how he achieved this? from his own words:

I was fortunate that Dana had a level of trust with me—that she was willing to open up as she had. Digital-Tutors didn’t have a monopoly on training for creative artists. We lived and worked in Oklahoma City. We certainly didn’t have an abundance of choice when hiring from the small industry talent pool. Besides our core staff of thirty-two, we worked with over three hundred freelance subcontractors who could (and did) hire out their skills all over the world. We didn’t have a capital advantage, since we (proudly) had zero debt and zero investors. We didn’t have a technological advantage; anyone can publish videos. We didn’t have exclusive contracts with our customers; they could get their training from anybody, including free YouTube videos. In short, there was no piece of our puzzle that a competitor (or even a current employee) couldn’t go out and copy.

Except culture.

You can’t instantly create a network of relationships. You can’t recreate the dynamics of a tight-knit group. You can’t reproduce the social infrastructure and productivity of a team that already works beautifully together. Our culture is what attracted the best people to DT.

Over a few hundred years ago, the factories of the Industrial Age were massive. The start-up capital alone kept production in the hands of the über-fich. Who could afford to buy the enormous machines to fun an assembly line but huge corporations?

Those days are long past. In today’s economy, your most import- ant assets get up and go home every night. Every morning, your product lines reassemble themselves to start churning out wid- gets (real or intangible) for your customers. Some days, some parts and pieces of the production line don’t show up.

Some days, those assets even get up, walk out, go down the street, and walk into the doors of one of your competitors. In nearly every industry, the barriers to entry have been swept away. As New York Times’ journalist Tom Friedman says, “The world is flat,” fight? The only competitive advantage business owners can truly, wholly, and uniquely own anymore—if “own” even applies—is their company’s culture.

If that’s the case, you’d better make sure it’s a culture that matters. As a business owner, you can create your own sandbox or company or whatever you want to call it. Culture is bigger than the sum of its parts. I think of culture as the moat around my business. The more my culture matters… the more loyal my people are to me and my company…the deeper their relationships are with me and with each other.. .the deeper and wider the moat gets around my business and the harder it is for the competition to hire my talent away (not to mention the fact that it makes my people reluctant to leave in the first place).

Putting all other considerations aside and focusing purely on business strategy, your culture is the only thing your competition can’t copy. They can copy your technology, your methods, your warehouses, your kitschy offices, your HR policies, and your ideas. They can’t copy how your company makes your tribe feel.

Is your leadership team telling you what you want to hear, of what you need to hear? Trying to get to the core of how your tribe really feels can be tough. If you’re lucky, you’ll have someone like Dana who will tell you what you need to hear. Here’s a handy exercise you can use to get past the people who are telling you what they think you want to hear. At least once or twice a week, make a point to have a face-to-face conversation with people around your office to get a pulse on your culture. It doesn’t have to be everyone, and it doesn’t have to be the same people each time. Here are a few questions you can use as a framework for your conversation:

What’s the one thing that makes our culture unique? Why do you come to work each day? What’s one thing we should never stop doing? What’s one thing we should stop doing? To gain someone’s trust, you must offer your trust first. Allow yourself to be vulnerable first, and they? Il be more likely to open up to you. Sometimes all it takes is affording someone the opportunity to let you know what they really think. The most important thing! Don’t talk—just listen and say thank you for sharing.Don’t try to defend or fix the topics brought up.

Creating a culture that matters–Part I

Piyush Patel on creating his Digital-Tours has gone through the trials and tribulations of creating a sustainable culture. Some of the core points verbatim here:

Values aren’t something you declare; they’re something you live:

In basketball, everyone plays by the same rules. When a player makes a shot, no one questions the results; the player’s team scores points. When a player goes out of bounds with the ball, everyone knows that’s against the rules. Imagine the chaos if an athlete showed up to play basketball, only to find one player kicking the ball like a soccer player while another was hitting it with a hockey stick. Before an athlete starts playing, they need to know up front which game they are playing and its rules. Just like athletes, your team members need to know the rules of how to play the game of business. We called our values the “Rules of Our Game” because it set the expectations up front: “These are the rules we’re going to play by. If you’re not playing by these rules, you’re not playing our game.” So how do you get started? There’s something tactile about writ- ing things down. It helps cement your thoughts into something you can visualize. Start by writing down the words you think describe your core values. Sleep on it for a few days as you try to narrow them down to just a handful. Give yourself time to think on them, and circle the ones that resonate with you.

• What are the rules of your game?
• How will you communicate these rules? (Please don’t say a poster on the wall.)
• How will you keep your rules at the top of every- one’s mind every day?

BELONGING, AFFIRMATION, AND MEANING = B.A.M

Every company provides a basic paycheck and safety. Few companies truly go further up Maslow’s pyramid to meet their staffs needs.

Belonging: we want to be part of something. We’re hardwired to belong to groups. We want to be- long to a tribe, something greater than ourselves. We want to identify with the people with whom we spend most of our day. But to feel like we belong to a company, there are a lot of foundational issues that must first be put in place.

Affirmation: we want to be individually recognized and appreciated in a way that means some- thing to us. We desire something that strikes a chord deep inside us… not a gift card that reads, “Thank you, [write name here]!”

Meaning: we want to know that what we do makes a difference. Digital-Tutors sold online training for creative artists at $49 a month. What we ultimately did was change our customers’ lives. We showed artists around the world how to channel their passion into something that could put food on the table, give them a career, and put them on a path to greater success. That’s what Digital-Tutors did. That’s what our employees saw. That’s the mission we in- fused into our culture.

Create Your BAM

If this is the first time you’ve been introduced to the concept of B.A.M., know that there’s power in tracking your progress—in knowing you’re traveling down the right path to building a tribe to lead and work you love. Question: what are you intentionally and consciously doing to make the people on your team feel a sense of belonging, to give your team members personal affirmation, and to give meaning to their work? Write it down now, before you read any further. Once you’re done with this book, reevaluate your answer.

Create Your Belonging

After you’ve covered your employees’ basic needs, they needs to feel a sense of belonging. One of the best ways to do this is to start setting up rituals for your tribe. What are some traditions you can start to establish? How can you and your employees find opportunities in which to participate that build that sense of belonging because they are shared experiences? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Dine-around or progressive dinner: host an annual event where everyone in your company gets to participate.
• Lunchtime traditions: find your own Thai Thurs- day. It doesn’t have to be Thai or on a Thursday, but initiate the ritual. Same day, every week for a few months. Invite others to tag along, but refrain from turning it into a business lunch. Use it as a chance to share experiences with your tribe.
• Team jerseys: offer your tribe the chance to wear the same jersey. Periodically have shirts, hats, or other apparel made for your team.

Create Your Affirmations

In The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, author Gary Chapman posits that there are five primary ways (or “languages'”) that demonstrate love.. .and each person’s language is different:

1. Words of affirmation, such as a verbal thank you or a handwritten note.
2. Acts of service, such as helping a co-worker with a project even though you don’t have to.
3. Giving or receiving gifts, such as getting your friend their favorite candy bar or a cup of coffee.
4. Spending quality time, such as listening to your teammate for a few minutes, or taking time to have lunch or meeting for happy hour.
5. Appropriate physical touch, such as a pat on the back or a congratulatory handshake.

Every month like clockwork, Digital-Tutors had our one and only recurring staff meeting. Everyone left their phones behind and picked up pen and paper. We’d all gather around conference tables in a room where, for the next two hours or so, we’d reflect on what happened in the past month and look at what lay ahead in the next month. The core of the agenda was always the same: Values stories: 60 minutes Updates from each team: 30 minutes Important dates and financials: 15 minutes Your big takeaway from the meeting: 15 minutes As you can see, the very first thing we did was go around the room for an hour and let each person share a story of witnessing another employee who exemplified one of our five values.

Create Meaning

Before you can provide meaning, you need to know what offers meaning to your tribe. What are your team’s dreams? Have you asked? What are the stories from your customers that you should be sharing with your staff? Make them legends—stories that can be passed on for months and years. The 3 Happies activity can be a great way to help your team provide B.A.M. to themselves, but also for you to get to know what provides B.A.M. for each person on your team.

To get started, gather everyone in your company and explain the rules of the 3 Happies. Commit to doing this for the next days with your tribe. Everyone writes their 3 Happies on a Post-It. First thing in the morning (before checking email or starting work), have everyone in your company share their 3 Happies with their personal After they’re done, have a team leader collect them and the notes in a public space for the remainder of the day. At the end of the day, you (or someone you designate) can take them all down before heading home.

The Business of Persuasion–III, Harold Burson’s advice to an aspiring CEO

His advice verbatim – great to be emulated by would-be CEOs

I was never one to agonize over the meaning Of life other than to do good, as best I could, every physically, and financially I have lived my life under the assumption that I would come this way only once. I have never counted on a second chance. My parents instilled a behavioral baseline, what we once referred to as the golden rule, to treat others as we wanted them to treat us. Having lived an early life of financial hardship, I have always had compassion for those bound to lives of poverty, illness, and tyranny in whatever form. I believe every individual—not just US citizens—has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the keystones of which, I think, are a stable support system at home and an education consistent with the times. Only with an appropriate education can an individual benefit from opportunities with the potential to become positive defining moments.

Live long enough and you’ll discover life is something of a trickster. Wisdom comes with age; when you acquire enough to do genuine good, the time left to use it is limited. Most certainly, you can’t relive the past and undo those foolish decisions you wouldn’t make now. Life is also topsy-turvy. Most developed societies expect you, even require you, to retire when you’re at the top of your game. You know more about your business or profession, you know more important people, people return your telephone calls, your relationships are deeper and stronger. There’s some truth to the phrase “sixty-five is the new forty-five.”

Live to a really ripe old age—say, your nineties—and you’ll learn that your nirvana, rather stealthily at first, begins to ebb. A new generation—seemingly all kids—has replaced the big shots you knew in your glory days. If you still depend on your Rolodex (if you know what a Rolodex is), you’ll notice it’s not as jam- packed with names as it once was. Or, if it is still jam packed, then you just haven’t faced up to removing the card or pressing the delete button on your e-mail contact list after you read the person’s obituary. Despite your best efforts at keeping fit by exercising, watching your diet, nipping sparingly of the grape, and showing up for annual physicals, there comes a time when you don’t walk as rapidly, you can’t get up as easily from a low-slung couch, and you walk more cautiously down stairs.

Now in my tenth decade, I have come to the conclusion that the most important factor in life is good health, although some people are high achievers despite their health conditions and physical disabilities. I applaud such people heartily. Some of them carry a heavy burden. I have been more fortunate, never having suffered a serious illness. I suspect it’s part genet- ic and part healthy lifestyle. When pressed for details on my longevity, I answer, “It’s the combination of pills I take every day and a great medical team.”

But my observation of literally a hundred or more CEOs over half a century convinces me that the most successful have one attribute in common: they have the ability to build and work with a team in whose members they have the utmost trust. They also have the courage and the confidence to dele- gate even the heaviest responsibilities to team members. They schedule themselves in a manner that provides them time to think. Through the years, they learn of individuals at lower management levels who are spoken of as possessing ideas or qualities of leadership; they get to know these people, many of whom rise to higher rungs on the management ladder, some even to become CEOs. Through the years, I have made a study of the career paths of CEOs. There is great variance in how they got to the top. More than you think made it the hard way—that is, until a senior executive discovered them and put them on the fast track. More often than not, they proved their worth—many without an MBA from one of the prestige graduate schools of business!